I'm No Chef, But Here's How I Made The Perfect Steak At Home

I've yet to master the ability to flawlessly cook pasta, so I was skeptical of a product that existed to help me cook steak (and lots of other things) perfectly.

But the product, a sous-vide machine called the "Nomiku," tempted me to try.

Sous-vide is the modernist cooking method of placing vacuum-sealed food into a temperature-controlled water bath. It's a slower process than other ways of cooking, but the end result is perfectly cooked meat, eggs, and fish ... every single time.

A week after their wedding, the couple launched a Kickstarter for the Nomiku, a "stunningly designed immersion circulator the size of a hand- blender that clips to the side of any large stock pot to harness the powers of sous vide."

I tried out the Nomiku with the intent to cook steak. I'm not a chef, and steak seemed like a daunting dish to prepare in my apartment kitchen. But the Nomiku made it incredibly easy, and I felt like a professional chef as I sat down to eat my perfectly cooked steak.

Here's how I did it.

This is the Nomiku. It weighs a few pounds and needs to be plugged in to work:Nomiku

Plug it in and clip it onto any large pot you have in your kitchen. This happens to be the only pot I own, which shows how little I cook:Caroline Moss/Business Insider

For a medium-rare steak, I turned the knob on my Nomiku until the bottom number read 134.6 degrees. The bigger number, on top, changed as the pot of water began to heat.Caroline Moss / Business Insider

This is steak I bought at Whole Foods. I used just a third of the cut, because what if I needed three tries to get this right?Caroline Moss / Business Insider

I tossed the piece of steak, a little olive oil, and a smattering of spices into a Ziploc bag and closed it as tightly as possible.

I put it in the pot, which was already whirring. I set the timer on my microwave for two hours. (Yes, you have to make sure you have a little time on your hands. I considered ordering back-up pizza in case I was out of a meal by 9 p.m.)Caroline Moss/Business Insider

Two hours went by. During that time I would go into my kitchen to make sure things looked like they were supposed to look.

Was I really cooking steak in a bag, in a pot of water?

We would soon find out.

This is the steak I ended up with! It looked and tasted great, though my phone's camera didn't do it any justice:

Caroline Moss/Business Insider

For the sake of presentation, here's a look at the Nomiku promo, which shows exactly how the steak will look when you take it out of the bag:Business Insider

Then you put it on a pan and sear it for 20-25 seconds.

Business Insider

I was surprised by how good the steak was, considering my expectations were low. Using a Nomiku doesn't take practice or skill, just time; which is why it's so appealing to people, and why I'll be less afraid to use it again.

If you can turn on a faucet, you can cook the perfect steak with this awesome contraption.